On Last Legs

 

How do you explain the appeal guitarist Fred Frith has to a certain type of music fan? If you don’t know Frith, the question’s obviously impossible to answer, but it’s no easier even if you are a certain type of fan. The better question may be who that certain type of music fan is, and the answer to that question can be found in the 10,000 or so diverse people present at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival.

For the uninitiated, Fred Frith first emerged in the early 1970s in the English band Henry Cow, an unclassifiable experimental-, progressive-, noise-, jazz-rock band. More people probably heard of Henry Cow than actually heard them, and one way to establish one’s avant-garde bona fides back then was to drop their name in a discussion of bands you liked: “Yeah, I used to listen to Soft Machine and King Crimson until I head Henry Cow, and now that’s all I listen to” Case closed. You were officially cooler than anyone else in the room.

But if you weren’t a post-adolescent fan of the Canterbury prog-rock scene in the early 1970s, you may have seen Frith’s name on some of Brian Eno’s recordings – he played guitar on the tracks Energy Fools the Magician and Through Hollow Lands on Eno’s 1977 LP Before and After Science, and on Two Rapid Formations and Strange Light on Music for Films (1978).

Maybe you first heard Frith when he turned up in New York in the early ‘90s as the bass player in John Zorn’s seminal Naked City band. Maybe you heard his 1974 Guitar Solos album, or his 2005 set of duets with jazz composer Anthony Braxton. Maybe you heard him with Bill Laswell’s Material, or Laswell’s Massacre band. Regardless, he kept turning up in countless avant-garde and outré settings, and yet somehow I never managed to see him perform live.  

Never, that is, until the 2024 Big Ears festival.

Frith had three separate appearances at this year’s festival: Drawing Sounds, a collaboration  with visual artist Heike Liss on Thursday night,  a Friday afternoon improvisational duet with long-time collaborator Ikue Mori at The Point, and a solo set on Saturday afternoon at Knoxville’s Museum of Art. It says a lot about the richness of Big Ears’ programming that I was only able to attend one of the three performances.

The Thursday night performance was at Knoxville’s Bijou Theater, a restored, Georgian-style theater near the south end of the festival area. I had attended two performances at the Bijou earlier that evening – a set by Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen’s trio and by the Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch’s RONIN. It would have been the easiest thing to continue to hang out at the Bijou for Frith’s performance, but at the same time as Drawing Sounds, the American post-punk band Unwound was playing uptown at The Mill and Mine, and The Angelic Brothers, the duo of keyboardist John Medeski and cornetist Kirk Knuffke interpreting the music of Sun Ra, were at the intimate Old City Performing Arts Center. 

I would have other opportunities that weekend to see Frith that weekend, and The Mill and Mine was a long (3/4 of a mile) walk feom the Bijou, so I opted for the Angelic Brothers set at the Old City PAC instead. 

Saturday presented a similar dilemma – Frith’s solo performance at the Knoxville Museum of Art was at the same time (4:00 – 5:00) as Myra Medford’s Fire & Water Quartet (featuring Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Ingrid Laubrock, and Lesley Mok), and North Mississippi hill-country blues musician Cedric Burnside, although I think the largest crowds were at the majestic Tennessee Theater for Sons of Chipotle (cellist Anssi Karttunen with former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones). 

I didn’t go to any of those performances, however.  Instead, I attended an earlier set at The Standard by the raucous jazz quartet, Sexmob, and a later performance by jazz poet (for lack of a better description) Aja Monet. In theory, I could have run from The Standard at the end of the Sexmob set (3:45) to catch the beginning of Frith’s performance at 4:00, and if instantaneous transport was somehow possible, from the end of Frith’s performance at 5:00 to the Old City PAC for the start of Monet’s set, also at 5:00. But those are exactly the kind of sacrifices the scheduling at Big Ears demands – you’re constantly making time-distance-speed calculations in your head, while also considering the aesthetic quality of the performances and the probability of ever seeing that artist again.

I did catch Frith’s set with Ikue Mori at The Point on Friday, but to do so I had to speed-walk the one-mile distance to The Point from The Bijou after a set by Brandon Ross’ Phantom Station. It also meant passing on sets by Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, guitar duo Hermanos Gutiérrez, violinist Eyvind Kang with singer Jessika Kenney, and Ringdown, the duet of composer Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee.

But I finally saw Fred Frith and it was worth it.